Politics
L.A. is safer than it’s been in decades, but crime is an issue dominating the mayor’s race
Homicides in Los Angeles are down to levels not seen since the 1960s. Neighborhoods once awash in gang violence now sometimes go weeks, even months, without a shooting. And the follow-home robberies and street takeovers that captured the public’s attention in recent years have largely subsided.
By many measures, the city is safer than it has been in generations — and yet voters following L.A.’s hotly contested mayoral race might think the opposite.
The challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have zeroed in on homelessness and public drug use to argue she hasn’t delivered on public safety, while also criticizing how the Police Department has operated and been funded during her tenure.
Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member, said the fact that Spencer Pratt — the former reality TV star who has been attacking Bass from the right — has gained so much traction in the race is proof of how Bass and other candidates to the left have failed to change “prevailing narratives that the city is unsafe.”
Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign block party on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20, 2026.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Pratt has been particularly active on social media, where he has shared artificial-intelligence videos created by fans depicting him as various superheroes coming to the rescue of a city that, under Democratic rule, has turned into a dystopian hellscape.
In a March 26 post on Substack, Pratt railed against the thousands of drug-related calls that emergency officials respond to every month. He has said that if elected mayor, he would order the police and fire chiefs and the county health director to “treat every encampment as a grave-disability zone.”
“No new laws needed,” he wrote. “No endless task forces.”
Flanking Bass on the left is Nithya Raman, a progressive City Council member who was once the mayor’s political ally.
Raman has argued that Bass has thrown too much money at the LAPD, with raises for police officers coming at the expense of other basic services such as park maintenance and street paving. Raman said the LAPD pay increases have “bankrupted” the city, depriving other services of much-needed funding. In campaign ads, Raman has cast herself as a more sensible alternative to Bass. Raman has said she would work to reduce traffic deaths and prioritize safety on the city’s buses and trains.
When she first ran for office in 2020, Raman called for defunding the police, saying the Los Angeles Police Department should be a “much smaller, specialized armed force.” Since then, however, she has voted for some budgets that increased spending on law enforcement.
In response to questions from The Times, Raman said she would work to find ways to overhaul public safety.
“I’ll propose budgets that expand unarmed response, work with LAPD to improve 911 response to more quickly answer calls for help that don’t require armed officers, and will appoint leadership at the Police Commission who will actively partner with the City Council to work on reform,” she said.
Representatives for Pratt and Bass didn’t respond to requests for interviews with the candidates.
Bonin said Bass — who supported various police reform measures while Congress — has shocked some of her supporters with how “aggressively pro-police she has been.”
When she ran for mayor in 2022, Bass vowed to retool the recruitment and hiring process in order to restore LAPD staffing to 9,500 officers. That hasn’t happened. The number of sworn officers recently fell below 8,600, despite Bass striking a deal with the police union to offer higher starting salaries and new retention bonuses.
Mayor Karen Bass takes part in a candidate forum on May 5, 2026, in Sherman Oaks.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
On Thursday, the City Council approved a $15-billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which included funds to hire 510 new officers — just enough to offset turnover and maintain current staffing levels.
Raman has said the LAPD should not shrink any further because there aren’t enough officers to respond to 911 calls “in a timely fashion.”
Samantha Stevens, a Los Angeles political consultant and former legislative staffer, said people seem willing to back Pratt because he acknowledges that their sense of safety has been shaken — even if he has offered few concrete details about how to tackle crime beyond cracking down on homelessness.
Pratt’s critics say that his plan relies on funneling homeless people into a shelter system that doesn’t have the capacity to handle them all. Others have noted that the aggressive tactics he has proposed would probably face legal challenges.
L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, makes a campaign stop at the site of a home burned in the Palisades fire.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
“He’s kind of a case study in somebody who has a lot of opinions but has no idea of how the city is run,” Stevens said.
Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said Pratt seems to have tapped into a deep well of discontent among Angelenos who believe that crime and homeless have spiraled out of control. The challenge for Bass, he added, is that although the numbers suggest that crime has decreased, many people associate the sight of encampments spilling onto public sidewalks as “a breakdown” that indicates the city is becoming less safe.
“You want to go back to the days of Daryl Gates, you’ve got Pratt,” he said, referencing the former LAPD chief whose controversial police sweeps in the late 1980s yielded thousands of arrests while alienating large segments of South L.A.
“If you want more of the same from the past 20 years, you’ve got Bass,” Guerra added. “And if you want something new, then you’ve got Raman, but she has to explain what exactly she wants to do.”
Although Pratt and Raman appear to be the strongest challengers to Bass, several long-shot candidates have also made public safety a key issue in their campaigns. Some have gone after Bass for her support of LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. Hired by Bass in 2024, McDonnell has touted the impressive drop in crime under his leadership, but also faced criticism over an uptick in shootings by police and aggressive crowd control tactics during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Police Chief Jim McDonnell attends a news conference at LAPD headquarters on May 21, 2026.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Rae Huang, a minister and housing rights advocate, said if elected mayor she would immediately replace McDonnell with someone who has the “ability to really reimagine what public safety really looks like.”
“I’m the only one with the guts to say that out loud,” Huang told The Times during a recent campaign stop at a bookstore in the West Adams neighborhood.
In social media posts and interviews, Huang has frequently referred to the LAPD as “one of the biggest legal gangs in the world,” and said she would work on diverting money from the police budget to scale up programs that have shown promise in sending unarmed specialists to deal with emergencies that involve people experiencing mental health crises.
The city is already running two such pilot programs, but under Bass they have remained underfunded, Huang said. Last week, the City Council signed off on expanding one of the programs.
Huang said she would also invest more heavily in addressing the city’s lack of affordable housing, which she said is an underlying cause of crime and homelessness.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads against Huang and Raman.
Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur, has tried to strike a balance in his mayoral campaign, advocating for changes while acknowledging that many people still feel unsafe despite the historic drop in violent crime.
He criticized a recent vote by the L.A. City Council to limit so-called pretextual stops, in which officers pull people over for minor traffic infractions in order to investigate more serious offenses. The stops have been blamed for enabling racial discrimination.
Miller said that “constraining the Police Department is the opposite of what we should be doing.” He called for “leveraging” AI and modernizing the department’s archaic computer systems, which he said could allow the LAPD to catch up to other agencies that have embraced new technology.
Miller told The Times that he recently went on a ride-along with officers from the Rampart Division, which he said was eye-opening.
“At the highest level I think Angelenos don’t feel safe anymore,” he said. “They don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods, but more recently they don’t feel safe even in their own homes.”
Statistically speaking, the city might be safer than it’s been in decades, he said — but that doesn’t necessarily matter to voters.
“I don’t think it’s just perception,” he said. “I think it’s reality that crime has spread.”
Politics
Trump to kick off Great American State Fair as 250th anniversary celebrations take over National Mall
Washington DC to host Great American State Fair for America250
Ambassador Monica Crowley discusses the Great American State Fair, set to transform the National Mall in Washington D.C. from June 25 to July 10. Celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, the 16-day event will feature pavilions from all 50 states and six territories, a 110-foot Ferris wheel, traditional games, and rodeo competitions, aiming to unite the country.
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President Donald Trump will kick off the Great American State Fair Wednesday evening as part of celebrations surrounding the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“President Trump promised the greatest 250th birthday celebration in American history, and Freedom 250 is proud to help deliver it for the American people,” Freedom 250 CEO Keith Kranch told Fox News Digital.
“This celebration is about what makes America exceptional—our freedom, our faith, our optimism, and our people. We are honored to welcome President Trump as he helps kick off these historic festivities tomorrow and begin a nationwide celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday,” Krach added.
The fair brings together all 50 states and six U.S. territories for a national celebration stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument featuring military flyovers, musical performances and civic programming. Trump announced he will deliver remarks after a handful of musical artists pulled out of their musical performances, turning the bash into a “Make America Great Again Rally.”
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Organizers describe the Great American State Fair as a modern-day World’s Fair celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The event is scheduled to run from June 25 through July 10, 2026, celebrating patriotism to bring together the nation for a celebration of unity.
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U.S. President Donald J. Trump watches the UFC lightweight championship fight during the UFC Freedom 250 event on the South Lawn at the White House on June 14, 2026 in Washington, DC (Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
Trump’s anticipated remarks follow his signature last week on a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, launching a 60-day negotiating period aimed at preventing Tehran from ever obtaining nuclear weapons capability.
The world’s fair-scale event will have pavilions touching on five national themes: Made in America, American Heartland, American Innovates, The American Canvas, and Faith & Family.
There will also be a 110-foot Ferris wheel and the refurbished Smithsonian carousel for families to enjoy.
Rending of 110-foot ferris wheel coming to National Mall for “Great American State Fair.” (Freedom250)
The U.S. has hosted over two dozen variations of the world’s fair since first hosted in Philadelphia in 1876, according to the State Department.
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Freedom250, the nonpartisan group helping coordinate the broader America250 effort, said the fair will feature food, games, exhibits and themed attractions designed to showcase the country’s culture, history and innovation.
Politics
Why your food scraps travel more than 100 miles — and how an L.A. council member wants to stop it
Bob Blumenfield would like to see Angelenos’ old banana peels and moldy bread stay local.
On Tuesday morning, the City Council member told a small crowd of waste advocates in front of city hall that he was introducing a motion to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by strengthening local composting infrastructure and decreasing reliance on distant facilities.
Currently, when city residents separate their food waste and yard clippings, chances are it’s being trucked to faraway processing facilities in Bakersfield or Lancaster.
The motion would help the city meet targets set by California’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Strategy, or Senate Bill 1383, which phases out sending green waste to the landfill, because it is a major source of the powerful climate pollutant methane.
It also would help meet Mayor Bass’ Climate Action Plan, which aims to use at least 50% of locally produced compost and mulch within Los Angeles by 2030. Currently, only 25% to 30% of the city’s material is applied to land locally.
The city produces approximately 350,000 tons of organic material a year, Blumenfield told the crowd, which he said equates to roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
“That’s a big number, and when you do the math,” he said, that’s roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide released by the entire country of Belize, the entirety of Humboldt County or the equivalent of burning 1.6 billion pounds of coal per year.
As the announcement was underway, in the background a fire burned for a sixth day in a Boyle Heights warehouse, where 85 million pounds of frozen food was thawing and beginning to rot.
Signed into law in 2016, the state’s composting bill mandated a gradual increase in the amount of organic waste that must be diverted away from landfills. It required 50% of all green and food waste be diverted by 2020; by 2025, that number was supposed to hit 75%.
But it hasn’t. Although Los Angeles has pushed to get a residential curbside bin program in place — recall the “Great Green Bin Apocalypse of 2025” — it has struggled to get people to comply.
According to reports for the recycLA program, a commercial and multifamily waste collection franchise program, only about half of households and business are separating their compostable waste.
Alex Helou, assistant general manager of L.A. Sanitation & Environment, provided a much brighter picture of the city’s food waste situation. L.A. is the first major city to provide green bins to 750,000 residential customers, he said. The city has “exceeded expectations” in food recovery, he said, saving 80 million meals that would have been thrown out and redirecting them to people in need.
Helou said Blumenfield’s motion completes the loop by keeping food waste close to home, creating more local composting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting waste outside of the city. It doesn’t directly affect the city’s compliance with SB 1383, but that isn’t necessary, he said. “We’re meeting that and exceeding that at multiple fronts.”
Blumenfield’s initiative directs the Bureau of Sanitation to develop a plan for expanding local composting across the city. It would also increase the use of locally produced compost and mulch.
For instance, the motion would encourage using the compost on urban farms and at community gardens and city parks. It also would be used to replace artificial grass and turf.
It will support a “citywide transition away from artificial turf and towards nature-based solutions, such as California native plants and natural grass plant fields, and ensure everyone has access to safer, cooler, and sustainable parks, schools, and communities,” said Terry Saucier, a Tarzana resident and member of the Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance and the Tarzana Neighborhood Council.
The state’s composting law has proved challenging on several fronts.
The Antelope Valley has become a dumping site for many of the city’s haulers looking to cut transport and facility costs — causing concern among environmentalists and others who say the material is destroying fragile ecosystems.
Complying has been particularly difficult for Los Angeles and much of coastal Southern California, where there are few large composters and low demand for compost. Unlike areas to the north, there is little agricultural demand for compost and mulch.
Experts say dumping in the desert has always been a problem, but the law made it worse by making it more expensive and difficult to deal with.
In addition, composters are struggling with the amount of plastic and other debris that people and businesses put in the food waste bins.
According to a report by Closed Loop Partners, which partners with companies such as Pepsico and McDonald’s, nearly 4% of food waste is contaminated with other materials — most of it plastic. State law requires that finished compost contains no more than 0.5% by dry weight of physical contaminants.
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Democratic Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, whom pundits consider a potential 2028 presidential contender, is one step closer to winning re-election this year.
Moore on Tuesday captured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the solidly blue Mid-Atlantic state, the Associated Press reports.
Moore and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, easily dispatched a primary challenge from Eric Felber and his running mate, LaTrece Hawkins Lytes. Felber, a physician, unsuccessfully challenged Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin in the 2024 primary in the state’s 8th Congressional District.
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Maryland Gov. Wes Moore speaks during an announcement at the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 16, 2026. (Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run on the same ticket in Maryland.
The Democratic ticket will face the winners of a nine-way Republican primary field.
Moore is running for re-election this year amid speculation that he also is eyeing a run for the White House in 2028, in the race to succeed term-limited President Donald Trump. Democrats are expected to field a large and competitive field in the race for their party’s presidential nomination.
The governor has consistently ruled out running for the White House in 2028, saying that his political focus is on his home state and his 2026 re-election.
But regardless, Moore remains a top Democratic Party surrogate in national politics. And Moore, a 47-year-old Army veteran, who is also a Rhodes Scholar and was CEO of the charitable organization the Robin Hood Foundation during the coronavirus pandemic, is viewed as a rising star in the party.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and President Donald Trump are pictured together in a split image. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images; Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Moore, the nation’s only Black governor, has had a combustible relationship with Trump, which has included very public feuds and verbal sparring, and clashes over policy.
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Earlier this year, Trump initially excluded Moore from a National Governors Association dinner at the White House, charging that the governor was “not worthy” of attending.
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